The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy Read Free Page B

tight black drainpipe jeans and a mohair jumper and smelt of patchouli oil. I can even remember the words of most of those songs. I remember a flight to Berlin when a man asked me if I wanted to go back to his hotel with him and I agreed and then his wife turned round from the seat in front and smiled. I remember being in love with someone at university who never unpacked his bag and had three pairs of identical Levi’s jeans and three white shirts, which he rotated each day. Tom would have approved of him. Why have these memories stayed with me while others are lost for ever? If this is what I remember now, will that be what I remember in twenty years’ time?
    Mention of Sexy Domesticated Dad’s powerhouse wife brings me up short, because I have never considered him in the plural, and I arrange my features into friendly but businesslike mode. ‘How is she, did she manage to unwind?’
    ‘She’s never very good at doing that, she’s got too much energy. Look, do you want to grab a coffee after you’ve dropped off the kids?’
    ‘Great,’ I say, trying to appear composed in the face of this unexpected incursion into my daydreams. Then I notice him looking suspiciously at my feet.
    ‘Are you wearing tartan pyjamas under that coat?’ he asks. ‘Maybe we should do coffee another time.’

2
    ‘Coming events cast their shadows before’
    DESPITE THE MIXED messages and tiny humiliations of that encounter it causes some geological shift inside me. Plates stirring after a long dormant spell. How else can I account for the renewed feelings of excitement that I experience over subsequent days? This is how natural disasters happen, I think. A series of imperceptible movements at the core, culminating in a catastrophe way down the line. I feel the way I do when I smoke a cadged cigarette while the children aren’t looking, reconnecting momentarily with feelings of liberation associated with a different period in my life, when pleasure was there for the taking.
    Over the next few days, I set off in the morning in the hopeful anticipation of chancing upon Sexy Domesticated Dad, and then berate myself for feeling unreasonably disappointed when he doesn’t emerge. Perhaps he is working again and his wife is doing the school run, although I know she has a Big City Job that means she has to be at her desk by eight o’clock. Maybe they have an au pair who is taking their two children to school.
    I allow myself to indulge in a harmless flight of fancy and imagine him in the British Library doing research for a book he’s writing. He could do that with one arm in a plaster cast but he almost certainly couldn’t type. He could dictate to me and Icould type it up. Him sitting in an old comfortable chair, his forearms resting on the arms, fingers pulling out bits of stuffing during silences while he contemplates me. We could spend long days shut up in his office (the children are out of the picture here), with me offering pithy advice and shaping the structure of his biography. Then I become indispensable, he can’t work without me. Not that I know what he is writing until I Google him one evening after the children have gone to bed and find that he is late delivering a manuscript on Latin America’s contribution to the international film world. Very niche. And a subject about which I know nothing. So there the fantasy ends. Benignly.
    ‘Excuse me, madam, would you like a drink, would you like to order something?’ I am aware suddenly of a waiter gently tapping me on the shoulder. He is wearing an impeccably clean and wrinkle-free long white apron tied round the waist several times, with a neat bow at the front just above his stomach. I think of the war of attrition being waged back home in the washroom, where the piles of unironed sheets and shirts are threatening to besiege the kitchen. Our Polish cleaning lady, who is meant to come one morning a week, is now too arthritic to manage more than a cursory dust and abandoned the